Over the past half century, the James Bond franchise has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to the various cultural, social, and political paradigms surrounding its production. This polymorphous feature of the franchise also applies to its treatment of women. Bond has pursued relationships with women as brief as a momentary flirtatious glance through to his marriage to Tracy di Vicenzo in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt 1969). Yet, the diverse relationship between Bond and the Bond Girl is often summarized by commentators as an objectifying one in which female characters are only valuable to the hero “to the extent that they are capable of bringing him sexual pleasure” (Arp and Decker 202). According to traditional arguments, the Bond Girl functions as a “reaffirmation of male supremacy” by playing a passive role to a virile seducer, her identity controlled, manipulated, and dominated by the larger meaning of Bond himself (Bold 169). Such analyses not only fail to give female characters throughout the franchise enough scope to exist in a theoretical space outside of the eponymous hero, but they also risk obfuscating a fundamental paradox buried at the heart of Bond’s masculinity that, like all phallocentric discourses, is “dependent on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey, “Visual” 833). This chapter aims to understand the gender politics of the franchise free from the simplistic binary assumptions of active/passive or seducer/seduced by discussing the Bond Girl not as a concept subservient to Bond but instead as an autonomous character with as much potential to challenge traditional phallocentric notions of masculinity embedded within the franchise as she does to conform and perpetuate such discourses. Utilizing a case study of Elektra King in
The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted 1999), I will discuss the franchise’s portrayal of the Bond Girl’s desire and sexuality as a way of understanding the manner in which phallocentrism permeates throughout the Bond film, as well as serving as a key device that disrupts the embedded ideologies of patriarchal society. Discussions of the Bond franchise’s perpetuation of patriarchal ideology often focus solely on the character of Bond and the problematic masculinity he embodies. Yet, as Jeremy Black argues, Bond’s masculinity is not a force of itself but is instead something that is intrinsically tied to his position as a “successful seducer” of the female characters he encounters throughout the franchise (108). Whether this be a character significant to the plot like Pussy Galore in
Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964) or a character like Jill Masterson who Bond meets and seduces in the opening moments of that film, Bond is defined by his ability to attract women in order to service his own means. By overtly sexualizing the gender dynamics in this manner, the Bond franchise makes explicit what is very often left implicit within other portrayals of masculinity in mainstream cinema. Rather than relying on symbols of sexuality, the reality of sex is frequently presented on screen in the Bond film, albeit in a censored and stylized manner. Bond’s position as an affirmation of patriarchal ideology is far less certain than it might seem to be. His function as a typical figure of phallocentric masculinity is to dominate agency and control the discourses of sexuality. He must define gender difference through male-orientated terms that place him as the controller of desire. Yet, in order to achieve this, he is dependent on the desire of female characters. It is this central paradox that is buried at the heart of the franchise’s varied representations of women.
Scholarly accounts of Bond’s sexuality have explored Bond as an embodiment of the phallus: a recurrent symbol of masculinity discussed prominently amongst psychoanalytic theories of patriarchy. However, they have often done so through male-orientated terms, using psychoanalysis as a “preferred system of inscribing ethical incompleteness” onto Bond rather than as a device to inscribe ethical incompleteness onto the franchise (Miller, “Cultural” 295). Bennett and Woollacott’s discussion of sexuality in Fleming’s source novels draws attention to the importance of phallic discourses in the Bond story’s perpetuation of patriarchy. Yet, their work focuses only on the use of “phallic imagery” in the form of the quasi-Oedipal relationship between M as father, and the role of the gun as the definer of Bond’s masculine prowess as “signifying devices which add an extra dimension to the tensions that are set up and resolved in the course of the narrative” (Bond 128). While Bond may not give the women he meets little more than a passing thought, analyses of his relationship with women must not to fall victim to the same kind of phallocentrism that Bond himself is guilty of exhibiting. It is important that we refuse the obfuscation of the Bond Girl that the franchise encourages through many of its formal and stylistic devices, and to see her desire as an expression of her own identity. In this manner, female sexuality and desire become devices that can serve to confuse and complicate Bond’s function as a viral embodiment of a patriarchal form of masculinity.
In George Stevens’ classic western
Shane (1953), the hero’s status as a stand-in for the phallus is achieved through the film’s valorization of the cowboy’s precision with his pistols. As Shane grips his gun to demonstrate his unmatched skill, he grips his own sexual agency—homogenizing and masculinizing the erotics of gender and, in the process, denying women access to a similar form of vitality. Bond, however, has no such luxury. By the very fact that his phallic prowess is explicitly sexualized, he is utterly dependent on the unapologetic force of femininity that the desiring Bond Girl represents. Bond is a character heavy with the weight of his own phallocentric burden and his relationship to his own masculinity is, in comparison with his Hollywood contemporaries, racked with anxiety, hysteria, and a deep-seated suppression of the possibilities of female desire. Critics examining
The Searchers (John Ford 1956) find Martha’s longing for Ethan in the occasional gesture within a
mise–en-scène otherwise preoccupied by the anxieties of men. In the Bond film, the desiring Bond Girl is invoked on screen for all to see, to know, and to feel. I contend that an important function of feminist critiques of the franchise should be to expose the moments where the franchise’s often frenzied portrayal of masculinity is brought to the surface, and to use these moments in which female desire is articulated on screen as the road mark for a progressive future for the Bond film.
MR. KISS KISS BANG BANG: THE DOMESTICATION OF FEMALE DESIRE IN THE BOND FRANCHISE
The phallus emerges in psychoanalytic theory as a pervasive idea that manages to articulate the unconscious gender dynamics surrounding the construction of patriarchal society. The concept first appears in Sigmund Freud’s writings on infant sexuality as a relationship between the male subject and his developing libido. As the child emerges out of the latency period, the penis becomes the primary focus of his fascination as the organ that comes to define his status as male in contrast with the absence of a penis the child notices in his mother. Misunderstood by the male subject, this observed difference gives rise to the idea of the castration complex, in which the child associates his sense of having a penis with a recognition of its possible absence. The emergent sexuality of the male subject channels the castration anxiety into a focus on “the primacy of the phallus”, a more elusive concept that is somewhat separated from the biological reality of sexuality (On Sexuality 308).
It is in Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in which the phallus emerges as a key concept to understand the tendency amongst various societies towards patriarchal structures and phallocentric discourses. For Lacan, the phallus is not simply a relationship between the male subject and his penis but a wider symbolic attachment that shapes his sense of identity. It “functions as a knot” by which the subject establishes a sense of
I in contrast to others while simultaneously functioning as a force by which the subject must measure himself up against (“Signification” 575). As Elizabeth Grosz argues, “the phallus functions to enable the penis to define all (socially recognized) forms of human sexuality” (116-7). It expresses the difference between the two sexes in terms of presence and absence, and soothes the male ego by defining desire in male-orientated terms and defining the woman “for what she is not” (Lacan, “Signification” 581). Possessing a penis, the heterosexual male subject is dependent on the vagina. Possessing the phallus, the male subject controls sexual agency, and the vagina becomes an empty vessel of meaning subjugated to his own desire.
Both Freudian and Lacanian notions of the phallus have been utilized by feminist theorists to articulate the manner by which individuals may fall victim to the phallocentric mind-set often perpetuated by patriarchal society, and the manner in which the phallus is based upon a fundamental insecurity embedded within the male subject. In the case of the Bond franchise, for Bond to function as a phallic symbol, he must perform this same colonization of desire. He cannot simply express a sexualized form of masculinity, but rather one that is reliant upon negating the role of the female. To be deliberately crude, Bond’s function as a manifestation of the phallus is not achieved simply by fucking the Bond Girl, but by fucking the desire out of her. In that symbolic act, Bond obliterates the concept of a female-orientated desire, and stands as a signifier for a dominating form of male sexuality that valorizes the penis to mask the unknown enigma of the vagina. The various films in the franchise are therefore tasked with the job of expressing the Bond Girl’s desire for Bond and then silencing it—enacting it temporarily, only to remove its possibility altogether. It is this that gives the Bond film its patriarchal ideology.
A standard way the symbolic force of the phallus is felt within the guise of mainstream cinema is through a misogynist fantasy built around the male subject’s anxieties over castration. Within the Bond franchise, this anxiety largely expresses itself through female villains such as Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (Terence Young 1965) right through to a more recent incarnation such as Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye (Martin Campbell 1995) who each display an aggressive form of sexuality as part of their character construction. Another manner in which the franchise projects a phallocentric discourse of desire is through the recurring characterization of the Bond Girl as a submissive daughter. Notably, it is the term “Bond Girl” and not “Bond Woman” that has come to define the lead female protagonists, and this infantilization works to alleviate Bond to the position of a controlling patriarch. Examples of this character type range from Solitaire in Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton 1973), who is seduced and made powerless by Bond (as she loses her ability of foresight after sleeping with him), through to Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill (John Glen 1985), who not only physically resembles Roger Moore’s daughter given the age gap between the two actors, but also spends the majority of the film being escorted by the hand through dangerous situations. The Bond Girl is not allowed to be equal to Bond for fear of challenging the autonomy of the phallus, and so she must be positioned as physically and intellectually inferior to the male hero.
The infantilization of the Bond Girl demonstrates a key aspect of phallocentrism exemplified by Lacan’s concept of the paternal metaphor, a theory he develops from Freud’s oedipal conflict between the male subject’s latent desire for his mother and the competition for her affection posed by the father. Lacan posits that through this conflict, the male subject comes to identify the father as a symbolic stand-in for society itself. In the eyes of the male subject, the father represents not only an obstacle for the affection of the mother but the ideal of masculinity to which he must live up. In symbolic terms, the father comes to “represent the vehicle, the holder, of the phallus”, and the male subject must adopt his mantle to become the phallus and be capable of satisfying desire (
Psychoses 319). Between these two recurring characterizations of the Bond Girl and the female villain, the franchise has served patriarchal ideology by continually suppressing the concept of a female sexuality equal to Bond’s masculine prowess. Yet, while it is true that most Bond films fall victim to a form of phallocentrism, there are moments throughout the franchise where the Bond Girl’s sexuality is articulated outside of Bond’s complex role as seducer. Elektra King in
The World is Not Enough is a key example of just such a paradigm. She is a character that, while contained within the patriarchal structure of the typical Bond film, is nevertheless able to present a version of female sexuality unmediated through the eyes of Bond. It is by highlighting such moments that feminist film theory might negotiate and subvert the established politics of desire within the Bond franchise.
“THERE’S NO POINT IN LIVING IF YOU CAN’T FEEL ALIVE”: THE UNTAMED SEXUALITY OF ELEKTRA KING
Within the promotional materials for The World is Not Enough, King emerges as a prominent figure that the film’s producers, director, and star would be keen to discuss. In an interview, director Michael Apted expressed his desire—shared by producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson—to adjust the gender politics of the franchise and include a female character that would more than just “sexual decoration” (qtd. in Jones 36). The dynamic between Bond and King would take center stage as the key relationship in the film as reflected in various marketing campaigns. This worked to obscure more traditional character types such as the cold, calculating Bond villain epitomized by Robert Carlyle’s Renard and the Bond Girl, nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones played by Denise Richards. In creating this atypical dynamic, King becomes one of the few characters to radically challenge the franchise’s varied discourses on patriarchy. Her very name seems to be a deliberate play on Jung’s concept of the Electra complex, his equivalent term for Freud’s oedipal struggle within the developing female subject, and through her performance Marceau seems fully aware of King’s position as both an independent character in the franchise and as a character riding on a wave of self-conscious fandom. The knowingness Marceau brings to the role becomes King’s greatest virtue, allowing the character to adopt a form of self-conscious masquerade that simultaneously performs the various roles established for the Bond Girl and yet acknowledges the falsity of such discourses.
The reason that King serves as such a fascinating case study is due to her ability to enact and yet hold at bay the problematic legacies of representation established by her predecessors. She plays on the various female character types established by the franchise as a key plot device. Bond is assigned to protect King, the daughter of a wealthy oil baron, after her father is assassinated within the walls of MI6. After an initial glimpse of her at the funeral, Bond’s first encounter with King comes through his research within the MI6 archives. Looking over news footage of her kidnapping, King is introduced as a frightened, physically frail woman who was abused by a physically stronger man. Bond is seemingly tasked with his traditional role as the dominant patriarch while King is infantilized by his gaze. When Bond meets her face to face, this dynamic of protection is further established. Although King initially insists that she does not need the protection of MI6, she requires Bond’s rescue from Renard’s henchman during a spectacular ski chase. Bond assumes the role as protector, and she is left with the perennial choice of the Bond Girl to either sleep with this surrogate father and give up her capacity for independence or doom herself to be killed at the hands of Renard. King chooses the former, and she and Bond quickly engage in a sexual relationship.
In a sequence of short dialogue exchanges, Bond and King are seen naked in bed together. As if aware of the function of this scene in the traditional Bond film, King confesses to Bond that she “knew” from the moment she first saw him that they would end up in bed together, a comment that exemplifies the standard archetype of submissive Bond Girl as she suggests to Bond that her desire for him was overwhelming and all-consuming. Much like Solitaire, she was able to see her fate in front of her and yet was powerless or unwilling to prevent it. Such a statement, however, is inaccurate and speaks of the masquerade being perpetrated by King. Prior to this scene, King had attempted to sleep with Bond only to have him refuse her advances in the line of duty. Now in her bed, it is not that King has been seduced by Bond but that Bond has finally given into his desire for King. Rather than presenting a male-oriented fantasy of desire being satisfied, her comment that she “knew” speaks of a determination on her part far more in keeping with the vamp-like Bond villain than the traditional submissive character of the Bond Girl that King is supposed to embody. She is not being desired, but is instead desiring in this moment. While they make love, King reaches across the bed and grabs at a container of ice used to chill a bottle of champagne. So often a symbol of Bond’s phallic prowess, King rejects the unopened bottle, which in previous movies Bond has been so keen to uncork and pop, in favor of the ice itself. She places the blocks in her mouth, and enjoys the sensation of them melting. King has transferred Bond’s traditionally phallic display of male sexuality into a metaphor for her own desire: replacing the bottle with the ice and the popping with a sense of wetness.
In perhaps his most misogynist piece of analysis, Freud’s brief essay on female sexuality discusses the complications that female arousal has on his developing theory of the phallus. Freud’s notion of the phallus is based around the supposedly primordial expression of sexuality: the erect penis. Yet, as Freud acknowledges, the erect penis is one of two crucial expressions of sexual excitement, the other being the “lubrication of the vagina,” which forms a far more hysteric notion in his theory of sexuality (
On Sexuality 129). For Freud, the unseen, wet vagina represents mystery, perhaps even danger, and his discussions center around the elusiveness of female sexuality as lacking an overt symbol in the manner of the phallus. In
The World is Not Enough, King provides a vivid counter-argument to Freud’s mistaken notions. King holds Bond at bay—allowing him the fantasy of domination but refusing him the actual dominance to which he has grown so accustomed. She expresses desire clearly and articulately, and does not succumb to the dominance of the phallus but rather holds it at a distance as she performs her role as the Bond Girl. This sense of distance in these scenes is compounded later when King reveals the true nature of her character. Midway through the film, King is revealed to be the true mastermind behind a scheme to steal a nuclear submarine. She is not the Bond Girl but in fact the Bond villain, and these bedroom scenes are given a greater symbolic charge as her masquerade is exposed. Bond has not managed to enact the phallus’ ultimate fantasy and satisfy King’s desire. Instead, he has been used by King just as he uses the various women he meets in his life. Like Volpe, King has used Bond for sexual gratification and to acquire information. But unlike Volpe, her seduction has succeeded, duping Bond into an unsuspecting encounter with Renard, who is revealed to be little more than a hired henchman that King utilizes for her own gain.
Rather than being kidnapped by Renard, King has seduced Renard and the two lovers are revealed to be plotting together to exact revenge on both MI6 and King’s father for the treatment and subjugation she suffered earlier in life. In a brief bedroom scene between the two, what is notable is the lack of authority expressed by the male villain. In contrast to Bond, Renard is vulnerable and exposed, unable to feel the ice that Bond so expertly manipulated. Renard is incapable of embodying the kind of masculinity Bond exhumed in those previous scenes, and yet it is those very qualities that seem to excite King. She chooses Renard as a partner precisely because he does not have the phallus. Without it, her sexuality—her desire, want, and arousal—can be dominant. She embraces the complexity of her own desire and its independence from the phallus, accepting the desiring “cunt” over her desired body. This acceptance of the cunt as a figure of symbolic equivalency of the phallus—as something forceful, self-reliant, and without the need for Bond or Renard to be made whole—expresses a feminist goal to represent, articulate, and celebrate female sexuality as female sexuality. King embodies these notions on screen by daring to articulate her unsatisfied desire.
The most explicit confrontation with discourses surrounding the phallus comes during a sequence in which Bond is tortured by King for information. Bond is captured and brought to
her lair by
her henchman and the scene has a familiar feel to Bond fans. It is akin to Goldfinger’s laser torture device: a huge phallic symbol is placed between Bond’s legs that exposes the vulnerably of his penis as the two characters engage in a game of one-upmanship. This time, however, Bond’s male rival has been replaced by a woman. Revealing a torture contraption hidden by a dustsheet, King proceeds to explain to Bond that by cranking a leaver behind his head, she will slowly insert a brass rod into his windpipe that will choke him to death. Strapping him to the device, King begins to turn the handle and suffocate Bond playfully. Bond is literally being choked to death by a phallic substitution manipulated by King. In a vaguely misogynist exercise, King has claimed the phallus as her own and uses it against Bond for her own sadistic pleasure.
Yet, King mocks this discourse with a continued sense of masquerade. She simulates the sex act on Bond, jumping onto his crotch in a manner that invokes desire and highlights both the physical and emotional distance between the former lovers. She playfully asks Bond if he knows what happens “when a man is strangled”, and invokes the idea of the post-mortem erection. In this image of the lifeless but nevertheless erect penis, the complexity by which King reacts to Bond’s phallic mastery is revealed. King desires Bond, but that desire is not enough to define her. She is not dominated by her desire, but is still able to express it. In that act of simulation, she straddles literally and metaphorically two prominent characterizations of Bond women: the Bond Girl, who is beholden to the phallus, and the female villain who desires the phallus for her own means. She is neither and yet both at the same time, refusing the “abstraction of women” as a collective concept that mainstream cinema and indeed the Bond film often presents through its focus on exteriority, and instead insists on being a woman that desires (Bolton 3). The phallus is presented, but the cunt is still enforced. She can desire, and yet not be the victim of that desire.
CONCLUSION
The lackluster finale of
The World is Not Enough is a by-product of the franchise’s larger politics of desire. As King steps deeper into her role as villain, Bond’s function as a phallic symbol soon becomes clear as he is presented with the choice between killing her or risk being obscured by her. Her death brings an end to any disruption she might have brought to the franchise’s traditional discourses of masculinity, and a far more mundane action climax plays out in which two inadequate men do battle on a submarine which, as if haunted by the specter of the desiring King, is slowly filling up with water, drenching and drowning them in equal measure. As Mary Anne Doane argues, desire is linked closely to narrative, and the standard Hollywood film positions it as inherently masculine due to its persistent formal and stylistic eroticization of the female form (
Desire 9). This has never been the exclusive case with the Bond franchise. Its ability to present Bond as a seducer of women leads to multiple occasions where Bond is invited to be a figure of desire as well as a figure who desires. This stretches back to the opening scenes of
Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) where Bond is first introduced through the character of Sylvia Trench, but has perhaps reached a far more overt level in recent Bond films as the visual spectacle of Daniel Craig as Bond has been positioned as the key erotic symbol of the franchise. Yet, in dislocating and arguably removing the position of the Bond Girl, the franchise risks retreating into a more dangerous form of phallocentrism. Rather than confront its own infamy, the contemporary Bond film shies away from it. Rather than dealing with female desire as a concept that should be represented on screen without repercussion, the contemporary franchise instead removes it altogether.
In articulating the role of desire in the gender politics of the Bond franchise, this chapter has aimed to deliberately shift the discourses surrounding the Bond film away from a focus on its central protagonist. I have insisted on comparing Bond with his female counterpart, and have done so in order to suggest movement towards a future in which a Bond film might indulge in all its well-documented tropes and conventions while at the same time ridding itself of its more problematic agendas. Ultimately, my desire is to save Bond from himself. As has been well documented, the victims of patriarchy are not simply women, but all those who dwell within its oppressive symbolic power. In making such a statement, I do not wish to demean or dismiss the very real economic, political, social, and physical oppression that has been suffered by women at the hands of men. Women are the ostracized members of a patriarchal society, but the society it leaves in its wake becomes poisoned by that same ideology, as both men and women are forced to homogenize themselves against phallocentric notions of masculinity and femininity. Bond is forced to be the patriarch, and as such he is stuck embodying a pernicious and ultimately misguided portrayal of gendered identity. By (re)addressing the representation of desire, Bond can, will, and does provide hope that future films will be invested in a world of gender equality. As always, James Bond will return. In what manner of adventure remains to be seen.